


Off the Record

by aactionjohnny



Category: Bleach
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Innocent romance, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 16:01:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12136005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aactionjohnny/pseuds/aactionjohnny
Summary: The Bulletin is quarterly nowadays. There’s just too much on his broad, if skinny, shoulders to churn it out every month. The Spring issue will be his best.





	Off the Record

**Author's Note:**

> a gift for my friend!

She knew it was rude for him to keep her waiting, but she sat upright and patient in the uncomfortable wooden chair, balls of her feet just skimming the floorboards. The world seemed always a little too big for Momo. Nothing fit just right. The uniform hung a little too heavy off her shoulders. Her skin felt too tight in places, too loose in others. She pulled at it to adjust, and she cut off her hair. Hirako-taichou said they matched, with a soft pat to the top of her head, which felt so much lighter. Any more and she would simply evaporate.  
She knew it ought to be rude, but she had so many soft spots. Shuuhei's was big. One of the oldest.  
Momo kept tucking the hair behind her ears, which rang these days. She wasn't sure why she was so nervous. Her old friend and senpai was too kind to ask about the wrong things. He'd told her the gist. They both had new captains, and their peers seemed curious as to hers. She could not blame them, what with his odd little haircut and his loud records. The mask and the monster he had inside him.   
She couldn't get away from monsters. No matter how much she ran.  
And it did feel like she was always on the run. Her feet ached constantly and her legs were weak. She shut her eyes when the breeze came through the office window. It hadn't really tickled her neck before. Must be the haircut, must be the nerves. She kept her eyes closed because she was a little bit a masochist. Not like Izuru, and not like Shuuhei. Well, she did not know what they saw when they shut their eyes, but it couldn't be like hers. Izuru drank and cut himself open. Shuuhei worked himself quite literally to the bone and she was pinned down by memory and phantom pain.   
The door slid open too fast and her heart froze, as it did, like it did then. It took three medics from the Fourth to get it going again. Perhaps she'd suffered brain damage in the interim. She was convinced her wound had made her even more foolish.  
“Sorry, Hinamori-san,” he said, pleasant. Momo knew the tone. Happy to see someone you love, but hurt inside because it was not the right person. She turned just her head, and her neck made that little cracking sound, but she smiled at him. He bowed his head a little, looking almost bashful.  
The sadness had made him so.

Shuuhei opted to sit in another chair, facing her, but not behind his desk. That would be too cruel. They were closer, once. Sure, he'd protected and defended her in battle, just as she'd done years ago for him, but it felt too much like duty. She was a comrade. But then he saw her, impaled and hanging limp in the air before one he knew was dear to her, and she became his impressionable, sweet kouhai again. He'd yelled. But he couldn't do a damn thing. Only watch as Izuru pressed his healing hands to the gaping wound in the center of her chest.  
But his mind was elsewhere, then. He couldn't have helped even if he had the skill. He was too busy blinking and panicking each time it went dark. He could see, he could see. His most revered had only done it once.   
“It's alright, Hisagi-san.” The little smile stayed on her face like a plaster impression. “Hirako-taichou cleared my schedule for the day.”  
“Well that partly answers my first question.” He flipped open his little notebook. Do you find Hirako understanding of your personal life and extra-curricular duties? She laughed, and it was like bells.   
He'd made her laugh countless times, and he hated himself for not remembering each and every one. He should have cherished that melodious sound, because it would soon be drowned out. Ah, there was one...He tried to push a marshmallow onto one of Tobiume's spikes. She whacked him softly with her hand. But then those men...their benefactors and their masters, they entered the training room for a routine survey.  
“So,” he began, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. His arms were like a new born calf's legs, he thought. No time to eat when your stomach is busy rising, rising into your chest. “Tell me about your first day with him.”

She blinked. Him had become too loaded a word. How unfair, three letters so common and each time she heard them there came visions. It took her too long, lips parted and probably trembling, to realize he meant her new captain.  
“Oh, he was very kind. I was supposed to be welcoming him, you know...” But he'd wrapped an arm around her shoulder, this okay, Momo-chan? and walked her into his office. He had grunted at all the changes that had been made to the furniture, and promised to take her antiquing in the human world. “But he made me feel like...like I was just getting there. The Fifth wasn't the same place where everything...you know...” The walls seemed to be coated in fresh paint and the breeze traveled more freely through the once-stuffy halls.  
Shuuhei's face seemed to droop. She should have known it would be impossible to skirt around it. It was too far seeped into their skin.  
“He settled in like he'd never left. I told him I...I wish he hadn't ever left.” Uh-uh, Momo-chan, then ya wouldn't be wearin' that badge.   
She watched him scribble. The part of his lip that was touched with old scars seemed to curl upwards. She wondered why the scars stayed so long. Perhaps he clawed at them. Perhaps there was no one two wrap his wrists in restraints and tie him to a hospital bed to keep him from tearing into himself.  
Unohana had done it to her with the gravest of expressions, like she knew.   
Momo's wrists hurt, and she wrung her fingers around them like a childish burn from sticky palms. She blinked too fast and her mind followed. Thrashing in a bed always, no matter where she was she was always floundering and flopping. She was always doing someone else's bidding even if she was strung out on anesthesia and sleeping pills, someone was always shoving something down her throat and why did she feel so empty if she had been full of everything bad? All bad, bad things and she can't put any good things in, like food, or water. Her body doesn't live on that anymore--  
She jumped to feel arms around her. She had not even heard the awful noise of a wooden chair being dragged across the floor to be nearer to her. The arms were skinny but strong, and bare. She was in Shuuhei's office, folded into him, and she settled.  
“I'm sorry...” She was crying, she then realized.  
“Don't,” he said. It sounded like some of her freshly-cut hair was sticking to his face. “Maybe this was a bad idea.” She noted that his pad of paper was strewn upon the ground. He must have tossed it.  
“He'll be disappointed. He loves attention.”   
Shuuhei laughed, soft and sad but sincere.   
“I can come up with something about him, don't worry.” He rocked her back and forth. She knew which him they spoke of.

Her hair smelled clean. It felt soft upon his cheek, painted always. Muguruma-taichou hated that. Her shoulders were too slight in his arms, like she would shrink into nothing if he held on long enough, but he did it anyway. He slid one hand down her back, again, again, as if pressing wrinkles out of her clothes, pressing tears out of her heart.  
“We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to,” he assured her. His voice was quiet but gravelly all at once. He hardly recognized it anymore.   
“I don't.” There was no one she wanted to tell. Their horror would outweigh her confession. She couldn't put anyone through that. He nodded, and the motion of his skin against her ear made her shiver. It had been so long since anyone was so close. It had been so long... “Can we stay like this?”  
“Yes.” He did not hesitate, and he adjusted, getting closer, a hand upon the back of her head. It was quiet for a while. “...I think this is a good interview.”  
“Yeah?” She was at the point in her crying when she was sniffing back every bit of herself that wanted to pour out of her reddened nose.  
“Yeah, my favorite interview.”  
“I'd...be happy to come in for a second one.”  
This just in: girl's skin is soft in my hands. Breaking news: Local man is idiot, should have realized it sooner.  
He pulled away just enough to see her. Just enough that she could see the warmest smile his broken heart could produce, and she let out a sharp and startled exhale. Like a revelation they stared too long, eureka! We've found something we've never seen the likes of...  
The little scars that topped his lips felt odd, like little scores upon his face. This is where it is broken up into pieces. It was the shortest kiss. She had to ease back into affection bit by bit.  
“I'll have better questions next time.”  
“Can I get them in advance?”  
He ran a thumb down her cheek. The pad of it was rough. He was rough, she was sure. He could be. All of them had that mean streak built into them by betrayal. But his touch was feather-light.  
“Okay. Do you think...do you think if two people take it slow enough it won't hurt at all?”  
“It always hurts,” she said.  
“That's off the record. Do you think if someone kisses you enough it hurts less?”  
“If it's the right one.”  
“Is it the right one?”  
“Yes, if you take it slow.”


End file.
